The Insider News

Jason Gorman[^]:

Software development’s not quite the lawless and anarchic wild frontier people make it out to be. Developers today have seven decades of
practical experience of writing software under commercial pressures to draw on, and there are many insights that have been built up over that time that an aspiring young programmer needs to know.

Jason Orendorff[^]:

Finding a needle in a haystack is easy. When it comes down to it, needles are not hay. Finding one book lost among a million other books? That’s hard. The only reason such a thing as a library is possible is that it is a gigantic, life-sized, walk-in data structure, tuned for fast lookup. This post is about searching and sorting, two fundamental aspects of data processing, and what the library has to teach us about them.

Eli Bendersky[^]:

I want to explore what happens when a statically linked program gets executed on Linux. By statically linked I mean a program that does not require any shared objects to run, even the ubiquitous libc. In reality, most programs one encounters on Linux aren’t statically linked, and do require one or more shared objects to run. However, the running sequence of such programs is more involved, which is why I want to present statically linked programs first. It will serve as a good basis for understanding, allowing me to explore most of the mechanisms involved with less details getting in the way.

Microcontroller Central[^]:

So you just finished your most recent Arduino project and are hungry to build something new and impressive. Feeling confined by the Arduino's limited environment, peripherals, and power, you begin looking around for other options, but there are too many choices. There are microcontrollers from dozens of vendors in eight-, 16-, and 32-bit flavors, each requiring its own compilers and programmers, which could add up to a fortune. Is there no cheap and viable alternative for the little blue board that has stolen all our hearts? Enter the ARM Cortex M series of 32-bit microcontrollers...

cbloom rants[^]:

One of the great tragedies of modern technical writing is that it has gotten so standard and boring. There is absolutely no reason for it. It does not make it clearer or easier to read, in fact it makes it worse in every way - less clear, less fun, less human. If you read actual great technical writing, it has humanity and humor.

JLOUIS Ramblings[^]:

The operating system is VxWorks. This is a classic microkernel. A modest guess is that the kernel is less than 10 Kilolines of code and is quite battle tested. In other words, this kernel is near bug free. The key here is isolation. We isolate different parts of the rover. There are certain subsystems which are outright crucial to the survival of the rover, whereas a scientific instrument is merely there for observation. Hence we can apply a nice fact, namely that only parts of our 2.5 million lines of code needs to be deeply protected against error. There will some parts which we can survive without.

Matthew D. Fuller[^]:

While there's overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what's important, some about who's important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn't tell you anything; it's the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do.

Lifehacker[^]:

The keyboard you think is the best will depend heavily on what you use it for. Whether you're gaming and need programmable keys, you're a productivity ninja who also needs programmable keys, you listen to music while working and want media keys, or you just like a trusty long-lasting keyboard that feels good and doesn't take up space, you probably have a suggestion. Well, we asked for them, and close to 600 nominations later, you told us what you thought. Unfortunately, we only have room for the top five...

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

I would venture to say that most software developers have some sort of belief that they are just a regular programmer, but there exists out there some super programmers who actually do the difficult algorithms that control caches on hard drives and index search results for Google. Now, of course there are programmers writing code that does all kinds of complex things that you and I don’t understand, but how different are those programmers from the rest of us?

The Economist[^]:

Are geniuses just born with their brains wired differently? Or do their early experiences fashion a richer set of neuronal interconnections that let them view the world through a sharper lens? An outfit in San Francisco called “tenXer” has begun testing a service that aims to help people boost their mental accomplishments by up to tenfold—hence its name. That has made your correspondent wonder what distinguishes the truly talented from the journeymen of any trade. And what, if anything, the rest can do to improve their more menial lot.

Phil Trelford's Array[^]:

Software is a product of humans, humans exhibit defects as do their software. Microsoft software is no different. You can report issues on the Microsoft Connect site or to Microsoft Support directly. My recommendation is that if possible you should do both.

Microsoft[^]:

If you are programming in Visual Basic 6.0 and planning to move to Visual Basic .NET, then the Visual Basic 6.0 Code Advisor is for you. The Code Advisor for Visual Basic 6 is an add-in used to review your code to ensure that it meets predetermined coding standards. The coding standards are based on best practices developed by Microsoft to produce robust and easy-to-maintain code.